Okay, so that’s the pgpd out of the way. I loved doing all the reading for mine but am a bit unhappy with the end result. I feel like I’ve learned lots though. And it’s got me wanting to read more theory. I’ve also begun to think that writing this blog is becoming very important in the process of actualising my thoughts and taking them from vague mumblings toward genuine orientation. So, I’ve found myself sitting with the seeds of a few thoughts/questions that I want to write down here, so I can see how they look on paper (sorry, screen) as much as anything. Some might either be obvious or plain wrong, but I want to get a bit more of a grasp of how these things fit together.

Nicholas Bourriaud argues that modernism never died, it just shifted shape and found a new dream. Read this PDF to get a fuller idea. It’s a decent chunk of his very useful, if slightly full of itself book Relational Aesthetics.

Cornwall

I took some photographs in Cornwall over Easter. Here is one such picture:

Regular readers, (Hi Andy) may notice my fondness for bleak hillsides. It was very nice to get out to take some pictures. At times I could have almost swooned with pleasure. I know this sounds daft. This is a really important part of making anything for me.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

She came and gave us a talk today. She made me realise how much I’ve missed by not attending lectures here. I’ll have to force time into my schedule. She spoke of layering techniques, putting one heavily manipulated image on top of another less manipulated image, then erasing lots of the manipulated one so that parts of the other becomes visible. She was kind enough to give me some slides from her powerpoint presentation that demonstrate this. This layering thing is clearly very relevant to my own thoughts about layering my moments (I’ve so got to find a better word for that).

I went to the Breaking the Rules exhibition at the British Library recently. I wasn’t that impressed by it, weirdly. I think it was largely to do with the curation, which didn’t grab me at all. The flow of the show didn’t draw me in to the avant garde project and seemed to be lacking in focus. But my ambivalence was perhaps also due in no small part to the fact that I’d seen a lot of what was there in books and on websites. Or at least I’d seen similar.